Team Clark is adamant that we will never write content influenced by or paid for by an advertiser. To support our work, we do make money from some links to companies and deals on our site. Learn more about our guarantee here.

Advertisement

The town of Cambridge, Mass., is looking at making it a crime for you to buy a soft drink larger than 16 ounces. By doing so, they’re taking a page from the book of New York, which has a similar controversial proposal in the works.

I am stunned at what in the world Mayor Bloomberg in New York or Mayor Davis in Cambridge think they’re doing. This is the land of free and brave. And yes, it’s also the land of the free and the overweight.

When I go to Europe, I often get dragged into museums to look at paintings. Much of the Renaissance art I see depicts people who are slightly chunky because that was the sign of health and wealth at that point in history. Throughout much of history, the bulk of humanity had to deal with the possibility of starvation and famine.

Today, however, we have access to food everywhere. No wonder then that more than two-thirds of us are overweight. Compounding the problem is that so few of us do manual labor. Even the manual laborers among us use machines to do a lot of the backbreaking work that was once done by hand.

Our human bodies are having a hard time adjusting to the lack of physical labor and the availability of calories. We went from having too few calories to too many. But the idea of a government ban to oversee that is flat out wrong.

What I’m excited about are calorie counts at chain restaurants. That’s a marketplace-based solution that I can get behind. The Washington Post reports pizza chains are terrified by the calorie count requirement. They’re worried no one will buy when they find out how many calories are in certain pizzas!

The marketplace should supply the info and then leave it up to you to decide — not the food police telling you what you can and can’t drink or eat.

Clark Howard is a consumer expert whose goal is to help you keep more of the money you make. His national radio show and website show you ways to put more money in your pocket, with advice you can trust. More about Clark